has been called to serve as a missionary in the Brazil Ribeirao Preto Mission.
Speaking the language of Portuguese
August 11, 2010- August 2012

Monday, July 25, 2011

My posterity is becoming numbered as the sands of the sea.

Well good and bad news. The bad: Elder Chaves was transferred. I cried when I found out. Good: I´m training again! I´m going to have another son. Will it be American or Brazilian? I´m really excited to find out. Tomorrow I´ll be finding out!

I´m sad that Chaves and I were separated. I really, REALLY liked working with Elder CHaves. I feel like he trained me more than I trained him. I was truly blessed to have him as a companion. Our last week also had to be the best week and he has to leave. He was pretty bummed because we had a lot of investigators at Church and a lot of prospective baptisms for the next couple of weeks. He was transferred to Araçatuba, the next door city. It has a whole different Stake and Zone their so I won´t see him much. I am very proud of my son.

I had a really neat experience yesterday with a baptismal interview. I had already interviewed a 20 year old young man named Jonathan about a month ago and he passed the interview but didn´t feel like he was ready yet. He was afraid to tell his mother that he was going to change religions. He had been attending church for over 2 years because of his girlfriend that started taking him to Church. He doubted his testimony and always procrastinated baptism. I was able to help him make goals recieve a firm testimony of the Gospel. He told me a neat experience yesterday when I re-interviewed him. He was praying for over an hour desperately trying to receive an answer. He decided to grab his Book of Mormon and randomly open a page in hope of finding an answer. He opened up to the very last page right before the index and in Portugues the book of mormon ends on the left side page and has a completely blank page on the right side. He saw the white page and was really upset because he wanted a specific answer. But then he noticed verse 35 I think it is. It is an invitation to come unto to Christ and accept Him. He said in that moment he knew it was the right time for him to get baptised. This happened 3 weeks ago and it took him all this time to get the courage to tell his mom about his baptism. But he did, and last night was baptized. It was quite a miracle.

We saw a lot of miracles in our area as well. We had to travel to a city called São José do Rio Preto because Elder Chaves has a lot of stomach problems and we went to the doctor there. We ended up losing 2 days of work because of it. But I kept praying to the Lord that we would be blessed to make up for the lost time. Friday and Saturday were some of the most productive days for finding new investigators and teaching that I have ever seen on the mission. It was such a wonderful experience and we saw the results: 5 investigators at Church! It was such a fantastic week. I´m so sad Chaves won´t be here to continue reaping the blessings in this area. The members really grew to love him and were all very sad to see him leave. I leaned a lot last week.

Well I guess that wraps it up for now. I´ll be informing you all of the newbie next week. I hope he is American so I can goof around with him like the Liver and Onions story dad always tells. I REALLY want to have fun with this. Have a great week everyone!